Lilly vs. Sniffy: Comparing a Live Rat with a Virtual Rat

   Shaping a live rat is very different from shaping a virtual rat. For one thing, the virtual rat doesn't poop everywhere, which is always nice. Also, the time it takes to shape Sniffy was significantly less than shaping Lilly. When working with Sniffy, it took about 60-70 minutes to complete shaping. With Lilly, it took 4 days, or about 120 minutes of training time. That's almost twice as long!!
   In addition, magazine training Sniffy was much easier than magazine training Lilly. It seemed to me that Sniffy quickly understood the rewards from the food hopper, while it took my live rat almost an entire training session to learn the connection. In addition, Sniffy would always go immediately to the food hopper after hearing the sound of the magazine; in training Lilly, she would often wait a few seconds before going to get her treat. I think my biggest issue with Sniffy is that the realism is pretty low. The graphics aren't very good, and the time it takes to train the virtual rat is a lot less than the time it takes to train a real rat. For example, in the Sniffy program you can fast-forward and speed up the training process, which is definitely something that does NOT happen in real life. But other than the realism issue, I generally enjoyed the Sniffy program.
   I think from a learning standpoint, the biggest strength was being able to place Sniffy on a different reinforcement schedule than Lilly. And as I mentioned earlier, I would highly recommend using both the virtual and the live rat for class. I was also able to connect many of the concepts from class to training both rats, and I know I wouldn't have learned as much if I had only trained Sniffy. So although sometimes Sniffy can be time-consuming to work with, I found that using both rats was highly beneficial to my learning.

This is one of Lilly's cumulative records from being on an FR12 schedule. She hit the lever over 900 times that day.